Higher Learning, Worth Every Penny

And now, as I'm sure everyone's bodies are finally beginning to purge the euphoria of the Plague's 50th and resisting the onset of the hangover of mundanity, I too, shall return to reports of the mudane - with a side of tomato juice to push off that morning-after headache.
Firstly, I will admit to my readers that this morning, at roughly 10 am, I surrendered in the war I'd been waging with the highly-involved mathematical project that'd been leaving me at the end of each day feeling slower than Stephen Hawking on a unicycle. At this point, I *know* exactly how to solve the problem - it's just that I am missing the means to make one crucial step in the entire process, as I've not yet taken the math class that shows you how. This particularly humbling problem was made far worse by the extreme number of small trials and tribulations that the so-called math tool known as Matlab has added to the mix. Never have I been so thoroughly thwarted by a program that thought it was smarter than me - when I want to graph a simple cube root function, Matlab decides to give every answer in the complex form (read: imaginary axes with imaginary numbers), thus rendering my graph in CARTESIAN coordinates (read: x, y axes) utterly useless. Since when is The Tool supposed to be harder to figure out than The Solution? For god's sake, my graphing calculator can do it! And so, after many days of struggling with essentially attempting to derive Linear Algebra and Matrix Algebra from first principle, I went to my supervisor and admitted to him that, well, I just couldn't do it with my current educational background. He was surprisingly nonchalant about simply putting the problem aside for later, which was a great relief, as I'd been avoiding him for some days now in order to steer clear of any inquiries on my progress. As it turns out that nobody at the office can solve it either, so that one project has been put on hold until either I teach myself linear algebra, or we hunt down someone who actually remembers what they did in college besides that blonde in their linguistics class who used to think that "gee, for sloe gin, it sure is fast!" In a way, I suppose this just goes to show the extent in which university-level math touches all our lives - in an entire group full of engineers and engineering interns, no one seems to know or remember how the hell they'd go about solving a fairly straightforward math problem involving functions, inverse functions, and reflections - I tell you, this gives me the utmost faith in the technology I trust my life with every day! This, of course, brings me to the quote of the day, from the mouth of a man who's in charge of managing several different brand new integrated circuits on chips every quarter:
"You still use math?"
Of course, today wasn't simply all about the depressing process of ridding me of that engineering idealism - rather, I'd have to say that the highlight of my day was the accomplishment of my own little engineering task.
As you may know, I've been contemplating for quite some time now about ways to undermine the Internet Gestapo's hold on employee internet access. Mainly the fact that the only way to access anything outside of the company's intranet is by using the "public internet workstation" - a decrepit old computer with no working drives save the hard drive and one very dilapidated-looking floppy disk drive with a broken LED - which obviously is yet another method of preventing employees from taking advantage of the precious internet access. As for the personal computers - well, suffice to say that the settings and registry were all locked down nice and tight to prevent the installation of non-standard company software. Mind you, this whole puzzle has been a side project of mine ever since the IT folks were rude to me that fateful day. However, I'd not gotten the opportunity to explore it in thorough detail until this week, which marked my first week working with one specific computer. As such, today, I non-destructively got through the measures taken by the IT department and managed to unintrusively secure internet access on the machine I'm working at. The beauty of this method lies in the fact that I can now do this no matter how many different computers they shuffle me around to before the end of summer. And so, for those of you who have access to zephyr - I'll be logged in from time to time now. Three cheers for using job skills obtained under previous employment!

Further bulletins as events warrant.